"When we got our first computer in our childhood, none of
us knew that we're going to change the world someday. Playing
games and typing simple
BASIC
programs was intended to be fun.
Swapping games with the guy next door was nothing serious. It
still wasn't when we wrote our first contact letter to another
guy in some other town; and finally we found ourselves in a
dazzling network of contacts, great projects running around us,
brilliant pieces of digital art filling our screens. This was the
magic of the demoscene.

Years have passed, and our innocent childhood hobby has grown
into an amazing worldwide subculture. Democoders, crackers,
importers, musicians and graphists from all around the world
changed the way we think about computers and the world itself,
changed our life, changed us forever. We are special, we are
demosceners. No outsider can possibly understand us. We are
FREAX.

It all started in 1996. As a known diskmag columnist, I always
wondered why nobody has ever bothered to write a long article
about the history of this world, the scene as we know it. I
started digging up traces of ancient times - how demos were made
a decade before, how our computers were developed - and realized
how rich and deep this subculture is. Even most sceners don't
have an idea of its exact depth. This certainly deserves more
than a mere diskmag article. I started writing a book, with the
aim of covering everything ever happened. From the
Commodore 64
to the Atari ST, from the
Sinclair Spectrum
to the PC - everything.

It is now 2005. A work of almost a decade lies in the several
hundred pages which I have on my hard disk. It's vastly deeper
than I ever imagined: it's not only the history of the scene, but
all the ancient computers
associated with it, the arithmetical routines used in demoeffects,
the past and present of all freetime computer activities,
and many more."